Quantum Computers will change

In a multi-pronged thrust, Amazon through its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division will be entering the quantum business via cloud services, research, and consulting services. The quantum computing cloud service is called Amazon Braket and provide access to quantum computers from D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti, with more to be added in the future. It will be a fully managed service that will include Amazon’s own development environment that will interface to these other systems. This could provide end users with the potential ability to use a common front end for programming their problem and then try it out on each of the three quantum computers. In addition, end users will also have access to AWS’s extensive classical computing capability for hybrid classical/quantum algorithms. IonQ is an interesting partner because they also announced a similar arrangement with Microsoft last month. In addition, Amazon is an investor in IonQ through their venture capital group and IonQ’s CEO, Peter Cha...

With the recent announcements from IBM, Microsoft and Amazon that they will be supporting multiple different hardware vendors and technologies on their platforms, it is getting complicated to know who is partnering with whom. So we have created a table showing Cloud/Hardware partners in a manner similar to our other table which shows Software Partners. The table reflects those partners and offerings that are either in operating now or have been announced. We will update this table when additional public announcements are made. Updated December 2, 2019 Read More

The Unitary Fund was established in 2018 to provide small micro-grants of $2,000 to fund people who wanted to explore open source quantum software projects. Since then it has funded eleven different projects in ten countries resulting in several technical papers being published and has helped to launch one new quantum startup. They have just posted a new article on Medium in which the Unitary Fund announces that it is entering a new phase with funding from IBM, Google X, Microsoft, Rigetti, Xanadu, and Zapata Computing.  The new funding will allow the standard micro-grant size to double to $4,000 and allow the Unitary Fund to support up to 40 new projects.  In addition, the expanded program may allow funding of a broader range of projects and potentially include projects related to quantum hardware, quantum sensors, and other things that are not within the realm of open source quantum software. Also in the announcement, the Unitary Fund announced that it has formed an...